


Wolf Country

by Spylace



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), DCU, Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Inception anyone?, Pack Dynamics, Species Dysphoria, Wolf Pack
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-08
Updated: 2014-01-08
Packaged: 2018-01-08 00:28:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1126208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spylace/pseuds/Spylace
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which there are werewolves and Talia and her pack seek more than justice in Gotham's underbelly.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wolf Country

**Author's Note:**

> Repost!
> 
> A fill for the kink meme but I seem to have lost the prompt. Can anyone link me back...?

i.

A woman sits near the window staring into the glittering light Gotham provides as she is slowly ferried across the water, her companions faithful dogs at her feet as she hums a lullaby, dredged up from the half-dreamt memories for a babe she has never known. For all that she had carried the child in her belly, pressed inside her womb; she has never seen it, him, her.  
  
Long before she returned to the pit, her birthplace, to her most devoted companion, she traveled the world and fell in love with a boy with beautiful dreams, whom her father disapproved of like the sultan in the story of the princess and her lover, cast out when they were discovered in a secret embrace.  
  
The babe was ripped from her long before it had the chance to bleat, hidden away where she would never think to look, cast deep in the eye of the world where her reach falls to short. It is something she had once known but chose to forget, sneaking furtive looks like a piece of mirror in the dark, playing the lights over craggy walls in shapes that defied imagination.  
  
She is _lupa capitolina_ , the she-wolf who suckled the children of men back to health after losing her own. Her affections she gives freely, playing out her motherhood on wounded men. She amasses power and bides her time, waiting for her father to weaken when she can force the secrets from his iron jaws. But he dies at another’s hands, his blood painting Gotham in crimson explosions which stops her cold.  
  
There is a fever about her, brighter than a wolf’s moon. Her name could have been Gloria or Victoria and all of them would have fit, a rage incarnate grieving for her lost child. When they land, the Court greets them with an imperious smile, her expression more poisonous still like the slow twist of a knife. She is not interested in their pretty words or riches proffered. She wants to burn this city for taking her child.  
  
The Court treats her like a dog at a table, begging for scraps. Bane and the others bristle at the insult, their hackles raised and fangs gleaming like a pale bird through the dark. They deny knowledge of her father’s murderer, claims him a loner, a renegade when she knows it to be otherwise. The parliament of fools, the mocking-court coos with conceit, so sure of their power in the island kingdom they built of corruption and greed.  
  
In Gotham, wolves a hundred strong patrol the broken streets. All but one comes to heel at the Court’s demands. But Talia picks her battles wisely for death is not nearly enough for the child absent at her breast. She lifts her lip in practiced contempt, her canines like a flash of sunlight through the tepid water, quick and painless when they crush the throat of the nearest wolf who dares to lay its claws on her, pampered and ignorant, unknowing of what it means to hurt. Bane throws his head back and howls as it convulses and dies, a corpse in her mouth, its blood wreathing her mane like she is the Red Queen.  
  
The Court watches with a bated breath as it witnesses her rise. Nothing can stop the cumulation of her desire.  
 

ii.

It starts small, wolves appearing during daylight hours just as Joker, the mad one, the undiscipled and fit for nothing but a skin near the hearth, terrorized Gotham with _Apollo’s_ blessings. Any resistance from the Court, from the crime lords who fashion themselves kings in Gotham’s wretched underbelly are brought to their knees as she pits them against one another, against the city, against themselves.  
  
She is the sun and a promise never filled. Her pack roams at her side, close and never far as she is its center, spreading news of a revolution soon to come.  
  
The poor, the desperate and the needy are only too eager to pledge their allegiance, humans all of them but with matching scars at their heels. None of them know what it means to join her cause though they will learn surely as she did the night her lover disappeared. The whispers of a coming storm flood the streets in its ardor, panic driven to a fevered pitch as she weaves her moon-mad spell on the city ripe for the hunt. Until at last the Court, seething high in their nest of bones, lure out their Dark Knight.  
  
Bruce Wayne has never known anything but contempt for the Court for all that he is merely a puppet dancing to their stilted tune. He is trapped in the delusions of his grandeur, of a freedom he does not yet possess. He is like a bat clinging to the glass, seeking relief from the buffeting winds. His wings are a leathery rasp against the window and she watches as she might a moth flown too close to the fire, gleeful as he plots his own demise.  
  
He is an unworthy foe, at traitor to her father and the killer of her child. She will delight in breaking him as she will the Court sitting on their mountain of dead. Bane licks her cheeks, naming her his goddess and worshipping at her feet. She smiles easy, sleeps easy, reckless and free, like the night she decided to lay siege to this haunted city and bring it to ruin like her dreams.

 

iii.

She walks in her human skin, elegant and perfumed. The crowd moves around her within a safe distance like she is a rock thrown in a stream, looking away immediately when their eyes meet or fleeing in the opposite direction, terrified as some primitive part of their mind is trampled upon, lanced like a seething boil.  
  
By chance, she stops at an intersection where three wolves sit in a row, cops all of them, their silver badges testing their limits in the smoggy air. Only one raise his head at her attention, body frighteningly still like a coiled spring, as though he might know her and what she does. His eyes, barely passed from blue, have the courage his brothers do not. The silky tips of his ears flicker back and forth as he drags air into his lungs, legs taut as though he is spoiling for a fight.  
  
His handler, sitting in a car with the windows open, the air conditioning turned to full, quickly pulls on his leash, condemning him as though he has done wrong when he has only shown admirable loyalty to one who does not deserve it. She tilts her head in interest, her hat pushed backwards for a better look. The pup whines apologetically, belly pressed to the ground and his brothers huffing disdainfully beside him.  
  
The sac of meat berates him with a heavy hand and a drop of mustard smears his nose from a hotdog that falls to the ground. The pup licks it away shamefully, looking a touch starved as his two brothers squabble over the fake meat and the bits of bread like summer gulls at a feast, pulling at each other’s ears and wrinkling their muzzles as though they are just recently weaned.  
  
They handler looks pained at his charges’ bad behavior and for a moment, she entertains appalling sympathy at something never experienced, pups learning to stand, to fight, to survive. The man bears with him false apologies while the pup growls at her approach, warning her with the leisure of a predator knowing that he can rip her to the bone.  
  
She scratches his ears, the wolf with no name but a number printed across his silver badge. If they cannot discern what she is, they do not deserve his warnings.  
  
He smells like a bird when she breathes him in deep, lightning quick but adaptable, not like the pigeons which litter the rafters in their filth and generalized uselessness but like a falcon swift and wary, capable of surviving in the city, raise its young and thrive.  
  
There is a kind of light in his eyes that she approves of as she does the flash of teeth when he pulls back his lips. She admires him, loves him even before she knows his name. He reminds her of a secret she once knew but chose to forget, like a glowing figure in the night, there one moment then gone the next. Slowly, he melts into her touch, even leans into it when she stands regrettably late for her appointment. He lets out a single whine, his eyes guarded but adoring as one might regard a benevolent king.  
  
A fortnight later, his human shape smiles at her in recognition, the child who never breathed outside of her dreams. He never notices the shadows at her heels, staring at him from the dark.  
 

iv.

Her challenge is the breath of Gjallarhorn which heralds the end.  
  
There are men on the streets looking for them, wolves who stand watch with stony glares. The city comes to life at night, she silently gloating while it slowly tears itself apart. People are discontent and more and more wolves find themselves homeless and alone, away from the fragile _pack_ the Court glued together, chained to wall with iron shackles and silver pressed to their hearts.  
  
She does not enjoy pain but there is wickedness about her like a witch’s brew. Wayne looks for her so desperately and she commends him for the effort, the traitor and the Court’s fool. He and Bane have clashed twice already, limping away with a shredded ear and a broken spine. She would have left him alone, let him dance until his feet seared off and she would have been happy, her father’s murderer brought to justice.  
  
But he has with him her beloved, swift and fierce like a peregrine set to fledge. He is a wild thing even when he stands among his brothers and it makes him wary; pretending at domestication is beneath him and she growls, her voice soft purls in the wind. But at once he looks up at the sound or perhaps its echo, eyes wide and alert and watching, hoping for a glimpse of her between the gothic spires and it pleases her that a pup of hers should prove so canny when his sire was not. But it seems that he has inherited from her a weakness in loving dreamers and fools.  
 

v.

Daytime is a kind of deception, casting an illusion of truth and justice where there is none, when in reality; it is just as dangerous as the night.  
  
She walks among people wearing the sunlight like a cloak, as though it may ward off the evils festering in the dark. The people know there is something wrong though they are yet unsure how or why. The city is at a standstill like the inevitable calm before the storm or the delightful image of a kettle set to boil. Her lips spread in a wide smile at the sight, of the Court’s wolves pretending to be chasing something when there is naught.  
  
They fall so neatly in pieces at her feet and it pleases her as the remaining pack-servants-dogs work themselves into a frenzy just to catch a scent. More and more the Court push them to heel, to obey and sniff out a phantom on the wind. Like their ancestors at the dawn of time, they hunt children of men and brew mistrust. A fire is building and it will spread, it will burn and she will have her revenge. She will wait for it however long it takes and it will be sweet, a pyre built over the body of her father and her child.  
  
She sees him once while he is running, the pup smart enough to claim as her own. Despite the silver pinned to his breast, he barely slows in his pursuit of a wolf, a stray perhaps or one recently born. It is not hers and she watches with mild interest as he pins it on its back before letting it loose in a repetition of catch and release she belatedly recognizes as a game.  
  
Sometime later, he is joined by Gotham’s Dark Knight, who prowls at his side, within an unknown space, noiseless and odorless and invisible to everyone else. Meshed against the pitch of Wayne’s pelt, her pup is blacker still, the color of absence rather than many. He is like a blank spot yet to be filled out for all that Wayne has made the first overtures with a shiver in his throat that is too familiar. And it makes her teeth gash as Wayne prevents him from rushing them like an alpha his lover, doting in a way she could never be.  
  
Out of spite, she howls, intent on leading him astray, a mournful cry joined by the chorus of others, hers and the Court’s. It is a magnificent sound and at once she is invigorated while Wayne bristles in reply, his fangs bared and eyes flashing but unable to discern where it is all coming from.  
  
But the pup, her pup, John, an orphan, not a name she would have chosen for him nor the life, but it suits him in his ever-present inquisitiveness as he sits, one pointing forward and the other back. As the last note fades, he opens his jaws and howls in answer, calling for something even he knows not but she does deep inside her bones.  
  
For a second, Wayne looks utterly betrayed. She will preserve this moment forever.  
 

vi.

But he does not come to her no matter what she does. He will not answer her betas posturing or their attempts at play. He is steadfast a wolf of the Court, Wayne’s feelings aside.  
  
In frustration, she butchers a dog in his name, its dying screams echoing off the precinct windows as it tries to crawl away. She drags a silver knife across its belly like a line of chalk through the grain. Her fingers sting, smolder and burn and Bane sulks at her indifference, melancholy and barely comforted when Barsad brings news of the Court, how they twist and writhe in their lofty nests. This is wolf business, pack business and the Court’s laws have no bearing upon them.  
  
She is angry and seething, she wants her pup, she wants her mate but she has neither and she paints the walls in red. Bane leans against her, holds her down until she calms. She shakes him off with a snap at his jaw and licks him across his eyes. When he lays down beside her, he doesn’t mind. He will reap his rewards as she will. It is the way of her pack.  
  
Slowly, she seduces him away from his guardian’s side, her pup, the child she never got to hold. She sees herself in the shape of his eyes, the color of his fur when she smooths it down with her tongue. From his sire, he received lankiness to his otherwise compact body and compassion which has long since been bred out of her, but she is a persistent teacher and while she has her teeth in his hair, she will not let him go.  
  
They keep him trapped under ground, a maze within a city which is slowly rotting from inside out. On the first day, he tires himself against the rocks, unable to comprehend that there is no way out unless she allows it. In the rush of the water, no one can hear his screams.  
  
Every cry is like a lash against her back and she cannot stand him glare at her so spitefully. She leaves the sewers in pursuit of the crumbling buildings where she is welcomed with false condolences and words sharper than any knives.  
  
The Court wants her for all that it cannot see her or her pack. She leads them on a merry chase while they keep him underground and if anything breaks, she cannot see it trapped inside a body too small for his heart. Her son clings stubbornly to his pride, the raggedy little flag he hides deep inside his chest. But like how bones must be broken before they can be reset, he is pitted against Bane who claws open his flanks in one blow.  
  
Her wolves approve univocally—he is worthy. Anyone capable of surviving Bane, have her adore him from afar like a lovesick offspring is special indeed. But he clings to his city, the only home he has ever known. His eyes become dim in the sewers, lost in the dark, radiant yellow bleeding into the dark umber of his human self.  
  
They drag his body into a damp chamber which had once been inhabited by people fled underground. There, they lay him out, pushing him to standing when his legs give out. When the traps close around his ankles, he does not even scream.  
  
By day nine, the air is tinged with his blood, his legs shattered and bones borne to the putrid air. His wounds bleed sluggishly like crimson pearls caught on a broken stem, swollen and blackened with infection.

She sings to him sometimes and he pricks his ears forward before setting them down, always standing even as mouthfuls of water are pressed against his lips. He snaps the air irritably as though something bothers him, a memory, his friends, or Wayne who frantically searches for him above. But he sometimes sings back to her in his more lucid moments, her child, her pup, her son.  
  
Day nineteen and something breaks, he hasn’t moved in the past two days. In the League of Shadows they use this method to break new initiates, potential hopefuls who are too arrogant to see the error of their ways, who think themselves mighty alone and are angry when proven wrong. She knows him to be better, smarter and yet he does not yield. Crane predicts that he will be dead before the week is out.  
  
Bane lays down beside him even when Barsad nudges him for the hunt. He explains to her, a child born in the dark, sometimes, kindness breaks.  
  
His muscles melt away, leaving him as a bag of bones in his ragged fur, sluggish and unsteady, silent in his clearer moments, begging for death when he is not. They force liquid onto him, food when they can. Sometimes he can keep it down, other times he throws it back up. He is crazed from the fever, seeking relief in what little they provide, the quick slice of pain when he pulls at the rusted traps, the softness of her fur when she pushes past.  
  
Most recently, Bane has taken up post of his guardian in her absence, teasing him with rumbled words, frightening him with outlandish stories which can only be true. The pup whimpers at the added simulation, glad and alternatively wary of the camaraderie Bane offers in his dank cell, the pain his only tether to reality as sickness courses through him, cooking him inside out. No amount of water brings his temperature down.

John Blake is dying.  
 

vii.

Alphas do not exist in Gotham. If they did, they would have come for him long ago, the darling little boy who struggles to believe even when the city is already ashes at his tattered feet. Wayne could have been one but the Court has had their talons too deep in the foundations, too corrupt for any sane pack to form.  
  
Her pup is only one of many chained to the service when he was born, without a pack, looking for approval in all the wrong places and consorting with the likes of Wayne. Perhaps that is why he is so amendable to structure, hierarchy, and the fluidity of belonging to something bigger, grander, a world where he doesn’t have to starve, be beaten, where nights are for him and him alone, never having to chase the pathetic sacs of meat who are nay a threat the Court would set the dogs upon them.  
  
Almost absentmindedly, he starts to lick back when they wash him, his tongue bloated and clumsy. She pauses in surprise but Bane goes on as though he has been expecting it, tenderly picking at the knots in his fur like he doesn’t notice. Two explosive wags of her tail announce her joy and she moves her pack above ground just as night falls and people are too frightened to come out.  
  
The Court’s wolves are too cowed to fight them, disillusioned and disorganized when their handlers die in droves, either by poisoned meals or torn out throats. Silver is discarded from their collars, their eyes sliding back to the wildness they had stifled so long. The police try, try and try to hold them, to confine them, to make them heel at their sides.

Gordon is in the front, shouting desperately with words that promise nothing but years of confusion and stilted pain. The wolves need a pack, someone to look after them, to care for them, someone to care for.  
  
One by one, they slink to her side, stomachs low and eyes wondering at the great she-wolf at the front of the pack. But then Wayne arrives, black as a horse. The first blood he draws she receives gracefully like a gift, darting between his legs and telling him that her pup had waited for him. It’s enough of a shock for Bane to leap on his brother and hold him by the ruff, separating them as he drives Wayne back against the waiting sirens. Wayne snarls in frustration and hurt, unable to believe that John has given up, unable to believe that John has taken the one thing he would never be able to offer.  
  
He is awake when they get back, his solemn yellow eyes flickering from her to Bane and back as though he cannot decide who to focus on. His first steps are wobbly like a newborn’s and she and Bane share a look of private amusement and fondness as he topples over, feet flailing in the air. His jaws snap over Bane’s ankles when he strays close and she realizes that it’s a game as her second drags him around the damp stone. She shifts into her human form, content to watch as the two wrestle like pups. She thinks that this might even be happiness.

Her son grows stronger, the child she never knew.  
  
He speaks of the city like it’s a beautiful thing, like a maiden seen from afar. He tells them of the fosters he had before he was discovered to be a wolf, too wild for the confines of Gotham and the elitist ranks under the Court’s thrall, too valuable to let go. Gotham is not the wolf sanctuary its everyone else makes it out to be. Only the very rich may roam the coasts of the island where there are trees thick enough to hide behind, squirrels too few for a bountiful harvest.  
  
He talks and talks until his voice grows hoarse, his throat constricted from breathing in the damp. But her wolves are enchanted at the skinny pup who grew like a sickened oak in the city smog, spiraling towards the bit of sunlight until he finally punched through the clouds and tasted the sun.  
  
Humans, she thinks, stole him away, away from the baited trap her father set for her.  
  
Humans, she thinks, beat her child, made him unwanted and worthless.  
  
Humans, she thinks as the city burns, embers caught in her hair like a thousand stars, charged her with fate much worse than death, more than twenty years of ignorance on the whereabouts of her son, where his bones lay and what she could do to claim them.  
  
Humans brought this on themselves.

 

viii.

The Court dies in a fiery conflagration, defending the corruption that has been their feast for so long. The entire city is in a riot, wolves and men running together. When she sees one hanging from the rafters, his salt-and-pepper fur cut carefully from his body, only his head, proud and solemn, glaring at the horizon like a taxidermist’s pride, she will see dozens laid out on the streets, all massacred in their beds, in their pretend safety impenetrable to pain.  
  
Bane laughs beside her, exalted and hers, but still overjoyed. When her bones ache, her insides bruised so that she can do little but curl up in her bed, he leads her pack in her name, her pup closely behind and learning to stand again. Were they humans, she might have tried this life of luxury, the falsity that blinded Wayne from the plight of his disappeared pack, adopted John Blake as her own, and played at a being far simpler than she.  
  
But they are not humans, they are wolves. And this parody of a relationship disgusts her in a way that it never had when she first traveled the world and thought love the most poignant thing. Now, the only love left in her is the faith in her pack and the love for a child she never saw, never held nor suckled in her arms.  
  
Her wolves rest with her in a ruined nest, the burning skyline marvelous to behold. Bane is at her feet, resting his massive head against her knee, his eyes half closed but wandering, like a storm of butterflies under the eyelids. His shoulders ripple as tension drains from his massive frame, tongue flickering out to lave slight at his thighs.  
  
She sighs, resting a hand between the soft peaks of his ears. John snuffles against her back as though he might adore her.  
 

ix.

It is not as her father had hoped, the island which could have been theirs to hold. But it was never the island she wanted and it is enough. She has what she wants. She only has to wait as Bane drags John forward, the pup whining apologetically from his jaws with an easy roll of tongue. He lacks discipline but he is loyal which is rare in the world he comes from and thus valuable to her.  
  
She can wait as a frog must wait for the rains to come or the birds staring into the bright phases of the sun. She has what she wants. She favors him with a kiss to his jaw, gently turning him towards where Wayne is held, his bulk heaving as he struggles to rise, his legs caught the way his was before the light.  
  
 _Kill him_ she sighs, _for me?_  
  
“No”  
  
His eyes turn a wicked gold, the fur fading briefly before he turns back into a wolf.  
  
Wayne looks up with forlorn hope, his blue eyes shining like twin stars, and she desires nothing more than to gouge them out with her fingers until it is only empty sockets staring vacantly at his presumptions, toss them in a jar as a message to all her enemies. She doesn’t realize that she’s pulling at the pup’s ears until he yelps, licking her wrists with a shivery whimper but not apologies as he turns away.  
  
He bumps against Bane, his mouth closing around the other wolf’s muzzle when he looks as though he would like to speak. His eyes are mirthful, relaxed as though he knows how this story will end. He is his mother’s son and his father’s, a strange sort of creature who should have never been born. He is hers, his, theirs, and they are his in deliberation that surpasses the Court’s.  
  
He whines softly.  
  
 _“Kindness breaks.”_


End file.
